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Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) [REVIEW]

I’ve had this movie at my house for over a month and could really just never get too excited to watch it. It might be because Rampaige claimed to put it in and said it was about “stupid lesbian vampires”, which confused me for a few reasons. Firstly, a movie about lesbian vampires that apparently had “child” in the title. Secondly, the fact that I knew it wasn’t about lesbian vampires. Thirdly, how could a movie about lesbian vampires be bad? Either way, she was pretty convincing about how bad it was, so I put it off…until now! The following synopsis will be really confusing, as it was pieced together by memory and verification from Wikipedia.

See this creep? She does a lot of creeping in this film.

The film opens with a couple being shot while in bed. The shooter then tries to escape by car, but wrecks, and we then see a blonde girl singing in a church. Someone tells her she is going somewhere else, and she gets a ride from a weirdo to a cabin in the woods, where she is being held captive or something? There are monsters in the woods and we have a few chase scenes and then a woman comes to help her. The woman who helps her is named Lemora, not the main girl, which is also a little confusing. Lemora gives the girl a bath and pajamas, which I always allow strangers to do, then the girl starts snooping around the house.

During her snoops, the girl finds records of other children having been there before her, and the childrens ghosts show up from time to time. Then monsters and wolfmen start partying in the woods and Lemora and the child are hanging out in a church, then the party enters the church. By party, I mean fighting. Also some guy has been trying to track down the girl for some reason. The girl kills a werewolf, which she finds out is her father, which is the guy from the car crash in the beginning. It then cuts back to the girl singing in the church, so you don’t know if it was a dream or flashback or flash forward, maybe flash sideways like Lost.

WHAT THE FUCK…IS GOING ON…IN THIS PICTURE!?!?!?!

Confusing, isn’t it? If I didn’t know any better, I would have assumed this was an Italian horror film, in both a good and bad way. This film was a lot more surreal than I anticipated, with lots of disjointed and jarring visual and audio elements. Lots of disembodied voices and jumpcuts to strange imagery. I assume that had I watched this late at night by myself, I would be wildly terrified. Its drawback is that it’s definitely confusing. I had no fucking clue what was going on most of the time, but I guess looking back at what online synopses say, it kind of makes sense. I would like to remind you that this movie is PG. And yes, in the first five minutes, a couple is shot to death in bed. It’s kind of insane how much they could get away with back then. If you are looking for a movie that is aesthetically uncomfortable with a disjointed narrative, I would recommend this film, but if you want your movies to have some semblance of a plot, it might not be your thing.